How It All Got Started?

Press List is a curated database of 257 journalists where I share their contact details.

I’d like to emphasize that all these contact details are publicly available so there’s nothing illegal.

But since it’s a requires a lot of hard work to get all of them into one place it became very attractive to others.

So…

After I created this lead magnet, I started to think about the best way to promote it.

I have opened my article about the blog post promotion (believe me or not, but despite the fact that I have written it myself, I’m still using it as a cheat sheet every time I’m promoting something from my blog) and my eyes stopped at the tip #55:

Here’s what I thought:

People who’re subscribed to HARO as sources are mostly PR and online marketing experts who’re looking to get in touch with real journalists.

So, Press List would most likely be something that would help them to solve just that problem!

Then I remembered, that sometime ago it was possible to buy sponsored links at the top of their daily newsletter.

Since I already subscribe to their newsletter, I went to my inbox to analyze some of their most recent emails.

Here’s what I found:

I analyzed some more of their emails and found that this is not the only one with an internal live link.

As you see, there are people who’re are submitting source requests together with links to their personal articles.

What a smart idea!

That was something I definitely wanted to test on my own.

The Process of Getting Featured in HARO’s Daily Newsletter

Here’s what I did:

I signed up to HARO as a journalist and submitted a source request, which looked like this:

I received a notification a few hours later:

And then… It went live!

My request appeared in the next HARO email together with a clickable link.

What Were the Results?

The very first email sent me 275 visits and 69 email subscribers.

Not the biggest numbers considering that HARO says it has about 800,000 sources, but you should also consider the fact that you’re competing with about 20-100 other requests in one email.

And there are not so many ways to stand out, except with your request title.

But HEY! It’s still a free traffic that converts!

Scaling the Campaign

After such success I decided that I need to go further.

So, went to look for other similar services to try the same thing.

After some research, I found a few nice alternatives that could be tested too:

I tried that same strategy, but it didn’t work because their policy is that the source website needs to be of specific DA, so my site didn’t pass. Bummer. But I didn’t check what DA requirements they have, so maybe it’s something achievable for me.

You are a very courageous guy. How dare you share this strategy for free? hahaha

It seemed that Haro worked for you so well. I expected that traffic can be blooming but also getting more than 200 email subscribers, that’s a thing. I think that happened because you have such a great desing and you share a lot of insights such as this one.

Hi, Marius! I love using HARO, and has been great for me lately. I’m using it to promote my brand by answering questions that I receive in the newsletter. I never actually thought of using HARO in the way you outline. It’s pretty smart actually. But HARO has some specific rules as to which websites they promote in the newsletter. And I’m also wondering about the quality of the traffic you get from HARO. It is worth testing for sure. Thanks for this guide!

Traffic is always one of the primary concern of any web owner and blogger. Although it takes a lot to write a well-researched article, but one need people to read it. Although, there are several methods to get traffic to your website. Your case study was impressive with haro, great to see how you got those results. And glad you have shared. Thanks, Mark!